[ { "id": 207765, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1976", "page_number": 153, "title": "RAS-1976", "content_text": "138\n\nW. A. REYNOLDS\n\nThe first two of these had their own transport fleets, the NHA had a few worn-out trucks, while the mission hospitals were partially serviced by the International Relief Committee (IRC) which also had some worse-for-wear trucks.\n\nIt was decided that the best service the Unit could render was to take over responsibility for transport and distribution of medical supplies within China for the NHA and the IRC. The immediate task was transporting about 140 tons of medical supplies which had accumulated in Kunming to Kweiyang and Chungking. Thus the Unit became the major civilian medical and relief transport organization with a series of routes totalling about 6,000 km, and shown on the map in Fig. 1. For the next four years the pattern remained much the same; the supplies came by air over the \"Hump\" to Kunming where the Unit took delivery and transported them by road, rail and boat to all areas of China under the control of the Government in Chungking. It was not possible to take supplies to the Shensi-Kansu-Ninghsia Border Region controlled by the Eighth Route Army or to the New Fourth Army areas. The first medical supplies reached Yenan in Feb, 1946 at the time of the Marshall negotiations when the writer arrived with 3 truck loads; an interesting trip but outside the scope of this paper.2\n\nTransport Routes and Operation\n\nThe tonnage of goods moved on the different routes (See Fig. 1) varied but throughout the 4 year period 1942-45, three routes carried the major portion. These were:\n\n1) Kutsing-Luhsien (✰★-✯⇓) 742 kilometres. This ran from the Kunming-Chanyi railhead 170 kilometres to the west of Kunming to Luhsien on the Yangtse Kiang.\n\n2) Kutsing to Kweiyang (-) 500 kilometres. This is the capital of Kweichow province and site of the IRC distribution operations, especially to Kwangsi, Kwangtung and Kiangsi.\n\n3) Kweiyang to Chungking (†-1A) 490 kilometres. Chungking was, of course, the war time capital of the Republic and is at the confluence of the Yangtse and Kialing Rivers.\n\nA diagram map and profile of the first route is given in Fig. 2. The other routes are included in Table III.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1976.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/hq382988q", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214840, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1999", "page_number": 255, "title": "RAS-1999", "content_text": "222 \n\nA Bold Approach to War \n\nI have referred to the indomitable spirit that animated the British troops and sailors of the War. This was something one cannot fail to notice in the various accounts of the War. As in the First Burma War, there was a boldness that must have taken the Chinese aback whenever it was demonstrated. Being practically universal, one minor example may serve to illustrate the rest. It comes from J.D. Vaughan, later a magistrate in the Straits Settlements, who had served as a midshipman on the Honourable East India Company's steam frigate Tenasserim in 1842, and is recounted here largely in his own words.46 \n\nA few days after the capture of the Yangtse city of Chin-kiang-foo, his captain took two of the ship's boats with twenty or thirty men each, with a brass three-pounder at the bow, and went to a town on a canal flowing into the great river. The writer was in one of these boats. The ship's Chinese carpenter, a Southern Chinese picked up at Singapore, could write but could not speak the Mandarin language of the area. Armed with a slate, and a truly astonishing degree of sang-froid, he made the captain's wishes to purchase provisions known to a large throng of citizens and soldiers who had assembled on the banks. Negotiating with a mandarin, they got all that they wanted, and during their brief stay were treated with the greatest civility and kindness. “A table and chairs were brought, and the elders of the city had a most interesting conversation with us through the invaluable carpenter. It was a curious sight to see the skipper sitting as cool as a cucumber smoking his cigar surrounded by our foes.\" \n\n“Few men,” Vaughan says, “would have ventured so fearlessly into the very clutches of an armed foe within a few miles of a captured city with war raging all around; and strange to say we came away un-harmed and not an angry face was to be seen amongst the crowds of men who flocked out of the gate of the town to see us.” \n\nMany other instances can be found in the books on the War, and indeed it was the norm. This verve derived from military and naval discipline and tradition, and from the leadership shown by, and expected of, British officers of the day. Only when that leadership failed, as in the contemporary disasters at Kabul in the First Afghan War, when a British army was annihilated through hesitation and mismanagement, \n\nPage 255\n\nPage 256", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1999.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/s178b887x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 216485, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-2003", "page_number": 244, "title": "RAS-2003", "content_text": "194\n\nThe move to China\n\nWhether his meeting with Archibald Little in the Oriental Club in London in 1899 was accidental as contended by some, or whether it was arranged by one or other of them is a matter of conjecture. The meeting itself was important to both of them. Archibald Little, an Imperial entrepreneur with an ambition to be the first to establish a regular passenger and steam service in the Upper Yangtse, was back in the UK to supervise the building of a paddle steamer designed for the task. He also needed an experienced and professional river pilot to command it. Cornell Plant needed just such employment. He must have been enthralled by Little's description of the great river, its problems and its dangers. The undoubted difficulties that Plant had overcome on the Karun River were trivial in comparison with the many natural hazards that existed in the Upper Yangtse that some claimed to make it the most dangerous river in the world. The annual snow melt in the high mountains and the seasonal rainfall over the whole area combined to produce variations in the height of water of as much as 150 feet - a scarcely believable phenomenon to a deep sea sailor. Plant was used to rocks, rapids and river water turbulence, but not the standing whirlpools, the moving whirlpools, the sudden holes that appeared in deep water and the rapidly changing nature of the river bed with every new rush of water down the feeder rivers of the great Yangtse Kiang. The talk must have whetted his professional appetite to such an extent that he even joined Little on his trip to Denny's of Glasgow where the new paddle steamer, the Pioneer, was being built. The result of their meeting was that Cornell Plant joined Archibald Little in China and took command of the Pioneer on her voyage up through the gorges, the first truly successful trip by a commercial vessel driven by steam.\n\nPostscript\n\nThis is the story of how Captain Samuel Cornell Plant came to be in China. His career as a trader, river pilot and finally Senior River Inspector of the Upper Yangtse is well covered in the article by AC Bromfield and Rosemary Lee. They also tell of the tragedy that occurred when Captain and Mrs Plant were on their way home on leave in 1921 accompanied by two young Chinese girls they were thought to have adopted.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2003.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/2v242g390", "rank": 0 } ]